You could zone out listening to the allegations, because they're rampant, ridiculous, and honestly not worthy of your attention. But while I was listening to the radio today, there was a story about something-or-other (I was exercising in the garage, and I was paying more attention to counting repetitions than I was to every detail of every radio story), and "MAGA Mike" Johnson was going on in typical mind-numbing fashion about immigrants, and how they account for drugs and crime, and who knows what else.
As a loosely related aside, I was just now listening to one of Brian Cohen's youtube presentations, where he was talking about how Republicans vote against various kinds of improvements, and against what the American people want, then take credit when the improvements happen. (So, apart from the political "optics" of frankly childish rebelliousness, if they eventually take proud credit for these improvements, why did they vote against them? Is it like the "terrible twos" reflex of toddlers? And let me say that the "terrible twos," and adolescent rebellion, are critically important to development, because they help young people create distance, and their own space, so they can develop autonomy, which they will need. But adults, who just say "no" to things they're prepared to celebrate, just so they can find some theory of opposition to some other group of adults, and at the expense, in the case of electeds, of the people whose interests they're supposed to represent?)
The question, then, is what the "no" reflex is about. And again, it's not the important and necessary personal evolution into autonomy and adulthood. They're already adults, at least chronologically. It's something else.
If you bother to read these posts, you might remember some time back that I wrote about Michael Moore's "Bowling for Columbine." Moore was trying to figure out why the prevalence of gun deaths in this country is as high as it is, which is higher than other non third world countries, and despite the fact that Canada (that was the comparison he used) has or had the same rate of gun ownership, but far less gun death. Moore concluded that Americans are a fearful people. They're terrified, they think they need protection, and their reflex is to shoot other people. We have a distilled version of that problem in Florida, where the law says you can shoot anyone who makes you feel uneasy. You can even go out of your way to provoke them, as George Zimmerman did to Trayvon Martin, and once you've provoked them enough that you can tell yourself that their reaction or resistance to being provoked makes you feel threatened, you can shoot them.
But back to "MAGA Mike," he trotted out a frankly very tired trope about immigrants. And he is not in any way the only one. The whole "MAGA" crew, and the common Republican platform, are founded in part on xenophobia.
Everyone in this country, except the Native Americans, is an immigrant (personally, or his or her forebears were). And every immigrant group -- the Irish, the Germans, the Chinese, the Jews, and every one of them -- has been reacted to in precisely the same way: they're dirty, they're lazy, they're criminals, etc.
But people don't come to this country with the ambition of acting out base instincts. They're all leaving something that wasn't working out for them, or was bad and dangerous, and all of them, except the African Americans, are looking for a better life and more opportunity, just like the rest of us and our forebears. And in very many cases, we essentially mistreat them. We make most easily available to them jobs no one else wants to do, and which pay poorly, and frequently are dangerous, and we subtly, or not so subtly, corral them into neighborhoods where they are more likely to be endangered by pollution and other problems, and less less likely to establish themselves and any meaningful sense of legitimacy, so they can move out and move up.
Why do we treat other people this way? And when there's presumably so much advantage here? "Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown." Despite all of our advantage, there's something wrong with us, and we know it, and we're afraid of the people we mistreat. But we can't admit that we're afraid, or that we should be afraid, and feel guilty, because we mistreat them, and look over our shoulders to see if the karma is coming. Instead, we demonize them, and decide they're terrible people (much worse than we are), and we should hate them.
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